Why You Want To Exploit Weaknesses In Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth

Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth’s dungeons feel like Etrian Odyssey, but the battle system is straight out of classic Persona. The Nintendo 3DS game rewards players when they exploit weaknesses with the Boost system.

In addition to doing extra damage, hitting a weak point puts the attacking character into Boost mode. The next time that character takes a turn, their skill cost will not cost any SP. That gives players an opportunity to use really powerful attacks without draining SP.

Boost Mode is also the ticket to doing all out attacks. While in Boost mode you have a chance to do a Follow Up Attack where one character will do an additional attack. If more characters are in Boost Mode you’ll have a higher chance to land an All-Out Attack where the entire five person party strikes.

kinda seemed like the smirk from smt 4 as well. P3 and P4 are classics now?

Kumiko Akimoto

For the same reasons you always want to?

James Enk

do we have any word for a western release?

Saphira

Fall 2014

JMaster3000

For USA not Europe ._.
I guess we are gonna need to find a ” Exploit ” to play the game.
Hint Hint it has to do with 4.1-4.5

James Enk

we are getting Conception and EO, maybe they will bring the over too

JMaster3000

You forgot SMT IV and it seems Atlus and Nintendo did too.
I have a feeling that we are only get the not so popular games by atlus, the big one’s are gonna be skipped.

James Enk

i never forget about SMTIV my friend, i leave in EU and it’s the game i am hopping to here about in every Nintendo Direct

Hexodious

As long Nintendo doesn’t localize any of Atlus’ games we can expect a release date in the near future. If not? Yeah well, we’re screwed big time.

Ethan_Twain

This sounds like a pretty cool battle system!

I’m still not sold on combining Atlus’ most character driven IP with their least character driven IP, but it sounds like behind all the Persona crossover nonsense there should be a real solid dungeon crawler in here. And I’m used to just tuning out a bad story for a good game (I play Kingdom Hearts lol). Maybe this is something I should plan to purchase after all.

Noor Mahmoud

Have you played any of the Persona games? Their stories were anything but bad.

Ethan_Twain

Oh yeah, totally. Persona 3 in particular is one of the most thematically rich JRPGs EVER.

BUT: There’s no way that’s gonna come through in this game. It’s being developed by the Etrian Odyssey team (no storytelling pedigree), it’s got a really dumb premise clearly just invented to get the casts of P3 and P4 together for a fanservice crossover game, and gosh darn it the Persona 3 characters shouldn’t be using the evokers anymore! That suicidal imagery was SO powerful in P3, but it was absolutely central to the game’s message and tone. That game justified that potentially objectionable symbolism so incredibly well. But now with our happy chibi anime versions of the characters running around shooting themselves in the head? I don’t think that’s okay anymore. You can’t just throw imagery that vivid around lightly. Symbols matter.

Crossover stories almost always suck, the studio making this game has only made one story game before really (Etrian Odyssey Untold) and THAT story sucked, and I don’t think stapling a character driven narrative about a bunch of angsty teenagers necessarily fits the Etrian Odyssey design ethos. Yeah, I don’t think it’ll be good.

But like I said, if it’s a good dungeon crawler then I can kind of get over that. And this sounds like kind of a cool dungeon crawler.

Noor Mahmoud

I’m pretty sure that the Etrian Odyssey team aren’t necessarily the ones making the story for the game. The role of storyboarding in game development usually doesn’t fall to the game developers. Especially given that Persona is its own series, you can bet that those who wrote Persona 3 and 4′s storylines will be helping for this one. Not to mention that you can’t judge a story by the premise and a couple of trailers. Don’t be over-judgmental until it comes out and you’ve had time to play it.

Ethan_Twain

What is a trailer but an invitation to judge?

Seriously – marketing materials like trailers exist to try and make a game look cool so people will want to buy it. My reaction so far has been to think that it doesn’t look cool and I don’t want to buy it. Either reaction is fine – that’s what trailers are for.

natchu96

Plot-wise they still can’t summon their Personas without their evokers all too well, so they kinda have to include the evokers.

notentirelythere

Actually, for a crossover game, the fansubbed trailers on YT seem to have some real interesting dialogue. Check a few out if you have the time!

Ethan_Twain

I did not realize folks had been doing that (though I suppose I probably should have guessed). Any particular Youtube channels I can trust? Any that you favor?

notentirelythere

https://www.youtube.com/user/bobrossfreak
This dude’s great–he even annotates over subs when he realizes they’re inaccurate or insufficient.
Anyway, it seems to me like they really respect the themes and character arcs the characters’ve went through in their respective games, and they made me much more enthusiastic and cleared a lot of my suspicions.
(in particular, Persona 4 is my favorite, and they touched on A LOT of the subtler identity themeing in videos… I wasn’t as attentive to the Persona 3 characters which are I’m sure what you’d be more concerned about, aha)

Tg

The KH games have good stories. They can feel complex, but they can be pretty easy to follow as long as you pay attention to them.

Guest

I love KH games, but… ‘good’? Especially recent entries which focus so on tightening up the world logic of the vague magical sci-fi. Turning universally understood metaphors involving ‘heart’ and ‘memory’ into objects works well enough vague and applied to character-centric stories… but each new lore patch continuing through KH+its progeny punches more holes than it covers when it tries to de-vagueify that, along with compromising the simplicity+earnestness that made storylines like those in CoM so memorable. The complications don’t provide greater depth/meaning and just play off continual story investment. The good is padded out with soap operatic gobbledygook… not to say I don’t eat the soap opera up, but it’s not like… dat gud in an extrinsic way. Like, one of the neat things about Persona is how it doesn’t pay much attention to its story convolutions and just uses what they represent, as abstractions, for its themes, repurposing borrowed motifs to better serve new purposes. New KH stories can totes invalidate old ones w/da patching.

Tg

You can’t really compare KH to Persona, because they have different ways of storytelling. (Like comparing apples to oranges.)

Soap opera? Hahaha… It has drama, but not really on the level of soap operas. And CoM has a “simple” and “earnest” storyline? If you call a memory witch, cloning and memory re-writes as “simple” themes, then, these “simple/earnest” storylines haven’t exactly disappeared since the first KH. KH has a lot of its straight-forward moments, but some of the “vague” stuff are done intentionally. Also, as of “Dream Drop Distance”, we’ve pretty much had all the important holes covered except for one minor trivial thing, which people can care less about.

That’s the way fiction rolls. KH runs a storyline that can be expanded, just like a book. Not work within its own set structure, but still use its magical logic doing what it’s known best for.

notentirelythere

You are right, the KH and Persona try to achieve very different things… but I feel like they use similar methods here and there, and the way they’ve each approached franchising and how that influences how their stories are told is interesting.
I also meant to PRAISE the vague! The vague is great. The specifics are why so much time in spin-off games was devoted to “no wait a minute ACTUALLY this thing works like…” asides.
CoM definitely had some funky stuff. I didn’t mean to imply KH/CoM never had convolution, lol, sorry. But say, compare the story lines in each world in CoM to KH2. More stories in KH2 are the ‘villains collecting hearts through general havok w/a Disney movie summary’ type and the ‘introducing future plot lines’ type, and the character centric stories are often more distanced from its hearts/nobodies than CoM’s memories where they were the driving force of most of the stories.
Ur last paragraph too, is making me go, “that’s what I’m saying! but in a different direction.” To me, games like BBS and 3D feel like magical sci fi logic for the sake of it, spending looots of energy on fortifying and bloating structures in ways that don’t help tell tighter, deeper stories.

Tg

Well, I can’t comment on anything about Persona. (Never played the games. Saw a little bit of the anime’s first episode right up to the protagonist being sucked into the TV part. Seems to have an interesting premise of its own, from my viewpoint. It’s good that it has fans like you guys to keep its momentum going. *thumbs up* :D )

However, I can still understand your views in that regards of light similarities/themes.

The way I see it, KH1 was more of a testing ground (because Squaresoft didn’t know whether it would float or sink). The story’s true foundation started around KH1:FM and got a bit stronger in CoM. Also, you have to really think of every single non-main console game like CoM and Days as mid-quels or sequels. Birth by Sleep was a prequel. Not as “spin-offs”. They’re clearly made to expand and fortify the story + characters. Not to try to bloat the story. If you read a lot of manga, this is a lot easier to get use to. Days was like reading a couple of backstory chapters that focused on the past of a few characters. That was Nomura’s goal to explain what happened to Riku after CoM, and Roxas before KH2.

Also, I feel that KH2 was made on a very formulated “safe” structure that resembled a shounen manga. Main story -> Disney world filler -> Main story -> Disney world filler -> Main story. The Disney worlds, unlike KH1, felt looser, but the main story parts were an improvement over KH1.

Birth by Sleep was made to explain what happened to Mickey prior to KH1 and how Ansem SoD came to be. Coded dealt with the Journal, but I never played it so I can’t comment much on it. Dream Drop Distance was the game that tied all the games together. In big and small ways. It explains what happens after KH2 and coded, but connects to KH3, while revealing Xehanort’s ultimate goal. Sora’s trip in The World That Never Was at the end revisits BbS, Days and CoM.

Some of the vague stuff questions, that fans have, I can also understand. But at the same time, some of them are just so vague that it can be perfectly okay to be left open without a needed answer. Some of the more important “vague” stuff can still be answered in KH3 and beyond. But, that’s kind of like in a lot of stories/series. There are certain things about side characters that you’d want to know more about, but the author doesn’t cover them. If their importance doesn’t really affect the main overall story though, then, it should be okay to let them go. ^___^ There’s always fanfiction.net to unleash our desires. Heh.

Steven Higgins

I like KH game and their stories, but I have to admit, while they don’t bother me, the recent revelations could be seen by others as retcons and a sign of weak storytelling.
Story-wise the first game was my favorite because it had the most in common with the classic Disney movies I grew up with.

Tg

There wasn’t really much of a story in KH1. That’s why, it was “simpler”. KH1 was a guinea pig, but it wasn’t the real deal. I can understand the magic of the Disney worlds and finding small secrets like lighting the lamps in Wonderland, but as a Disney fan, I find the “original” aspects of KH1 more interesting than the Disney worlds themselves. I do appreciate them for what they are, but I moved on from KH1 a long time ago.

Quite understandable for some people to still have some issues like the time traveling aspects. Although, that was foreshadowed in Birth by Sleep with “Mysterious Figure”.

Steven Higgins

It had about as much story as a Disney movie, that’s my point. The plot getting complicated doesn’t bother me it’s just that, like I said, the first game was like playing a Disney movie because of the plot.
Boy wants to save the girl he likes from the bad guys.

Tg

True, when you put it that way. You’re not alone on that Disney movie impression. ^__^

(For me, I viewed each of the worlds as the magical homages to the classic Disney movie era before Eisner ruined it. Completing KH1 left me with a different overall feel of “What? So, that’s not the end. Well then, we need backstories to a lot of things since this game didn’t tell us much.”)

Ethan_Twain

Yo, I PLAYED the last Kingdom Hearts game. They did the comic book “no character important enough to have a name can ever stay dead” thing, they did time travel AND multiple dimensions AND pulled a sixth sense style “YOU WERE A DREAM ALL ALONG” twist. They have people turning into other people, people being conveniently stored inside of other people (I reckon Sora’s “heart” is actually a 16 TB hard drive), and 13 versions of the villain one of whom is hilariously voiced by Leonard Nimoy (has such a good actor ever read such terrible lines?).

I like Kingdom Hearts 3D because it’s fun to play, but don’t even TRY to sell that story as anything but the most ludicrous self indulgent sort of nonsense.

Tg

>_> I’m going to guess movies like Inception, Now You See Me, and Matrix are not your forte? Movies that make you think?

If you played, paid attention, and/or read up on the prequel games, a lot of things you have issues with actually make sense if you just calmly think it all out.

//Spoilers//

‘”no character important enough to have a name can ever stay dead” thing’

Referring to Nobodies? Axel died in KH2 and became whole again in Dream Drop Distance. Nobodies are only one part of a whole person after all. Same goes for all the other Nobodies, who died in the past.

‘time travel AND multiple dimensions’

Time travel, yeah, but the multiple dimensions thing? They’re just sleeping worlds with dreams of their inhabitants. Think of worlds as living beings with hearts, because that’s what the game says. Pretty simple concept.

‘sixth sense style “YOU WERE A DREAM ALL ALONG” twist’

Um… There was no such twist like this in the game. We knew we were going into the dreaming worlds. The ending implies what’s to happen in the future, as in, it’s not the last we’ll see of the Dream Eaters. The dreaming stuff all happened for real. No one is going to forget what happened in the dreams (compared to Chain of Memories).

“They have people turning into other people, people being conveniently stored inside of other people ”

This has been the trend ever since KH1. It all started with Kairi’s heart going inside of Sora. The sequels and prequel expanded on what happens if more than one heart enters the body. The people turning into other people are the symbolic foreshadowings of the future.

And yes, Sora’s heart seems pretty strong to handle a lot of different hearts within him. It all began in Birth by Sleep, after all.

Having 13 Xehanorts explains why there is an Organization XIII. Why a fake Ansem had to recruit/nab thirteen people into his experiment. I can agree with you that Mr. Nimoy’s voice acting wasn’t strong, but I had to get use to it from Birth by Sleep.

If you still can’t understand any of that, Well, not much else I can do for you as you view such important story points as “nonsense”. ^___^

Ethan_Twain

Yeah, that must be it. I’m just not smart enough to keep up with the complicated plotting and profound insights into the human condition provided by Kingdom Hearts. You got me.

Sometimes brilliance just goes over the audience’s head and they don’t appreciate it. Really, I don’t DESERVE to play games with as intricate a tale as Kingdom Hearts – I only interpret it as sparkly melodramatic nonsense after all. It’s wasted on me.

Tg

To be fair, my first response to you should’ve been that opinions are all subjective. We all have different tastes of what we consider is good story medium. So, one person’s treasure could be someone’s else’s “huh?”. It’s quite alright if you still don’t get the story. I just hope you understand that there are a lot of fans willing to help people like you. ^__^

Peace~

Junko Enoshima

Uh, won’t that make it really easy to break the game? I mean, hit a weakness and use a skill for free?

http://blackstar2661.deviantart.com/ SilverSpades

It’s been like that since P3, as far as I know.

Aspenharls

This is different though. THere are no “1 mores”, just not using SP for skills.

http://blackstar2661.deviantart.com/ SilverSpades

Ah, I didn’t read the article clearly.

AuraGuyChris

Since this seems extremely suspicious and this came from Atlus, you bet your butt it’ll be needed.

natchu96

Rei pointing her corn dog at the screen with the determined look during the all-out attack looks hilarious.

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